Overwatch’s Ana Now Live Plus D.Va & Zenyatta Buffs

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Overwatch‘s first post-release hero has now been added to the game. Ana, a support sniper, was revealed just last week and added to the Public Test Realm, but is now live for all alongside a new trailer and a patch that brings buffs to D.Va and Zenyatta.

Ana has a bolt-action sniper rifle which heals allies and harms enemies, and a secondary weapon that fires tranquiliser darts to knock enemies out. She also has “Biotic Grenades”, which simmilar heals allies and harms enemies, as well as giving a buff to all ally healing for a few moments and preventing all healing of enemies.

She’s also Pharah’s mum.

We’ve already had story and game trailers featuring Ana, but Blizzard have now put out a developer update video where the designer Jeff Kaplan talks through the thinking behind Ana and her abilities:

The same update also brings other changes over from the public test realm, including those long-mentioend buffs to D.Va and Zenyatta. For D.Va that mostly means changes to her defense matrix, to turn it into an ‘alternate fire’ ability, reduce the cooldown from 10 to 1 second, and introduce a new resource meter that powers it with a full charge giving you 4 seconds of use. Meanwhile Zenyatta’s shield has been increased by 50 and his orbs of discord and harmony now travel much faster. Except no one cares because D.Va is much more fun than Zenyatta anyway.

There have also been small tweaks made to Soldier 76, Roadhog, Mercy, McCree, Lúcio, Bastion, some game modes, plus bug fixes. The full set of patch notes is available on the Overwatch forum. Despite the changes most of the tips in our Overwatch character guide should still apply and we’ll update it with Ana soon.

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For anyone looking to learn some details about Ana’s abilities (actual numbers; what abilities they counter or don’t counter), check out Furious Paul’s Overwatch guide. It’s the best resource I’ve found for learning specifics about each hero’s abilities.

So I played for a few hours last night… There were of course plenty of Ana’s about, which meant that there were even more colour based buffs and debuffs floating about and confusing the hell out of me.

For the love of anything that cares to listen, give us workable colourblind options!!!

Yes, and each one of them is fucking useless (excuse my language but Blizzard have said nowt and it affects a lot of people). They’re just adjustable colour filters which actually make things even worse (even to the extent that enemy colours look more like friendly colours).

Why they couldn’t let us choose our own colours for icons, character outlines, buffs and debuffs is beyond me… lazy programming I guess :/

yep, after going through the tutorial and playing a couple of rounds against bots, i went and flipped on the colour blind option for me and it made it worse…the colour blind option made the game worse for someone who is colour blind. good grief, blizzard, did you just read about it and guess how to change colours? sure seems like those options got very little testing.

Ana is a great addition. Don’t need to ask people to play support now for the next while because everyone will be trying her out.

The real star of this patch are the buffs. D.Va went from being underpowered to an absolute monster, McCree now gives people reason to fear him at medium range, and Zenyatta is finally able to be a viable support pick, instead of dying to a stiff breeze every other spawn.

Yes – I can second this. I used to always kill Diva with just about anyone because – well it was just too easy. Now…..its a real problem. She is quite a force to be reckoned with now.

Ana I find……meh – but I only used her on the practice range. Her sleep ability seems to be quite irritating on the receiving end – and the other problem is all of those Anna’s running around dont know how to actually heal. They are too busy being ineffective snipers ruining for the people doing the real sniping (read me)

I’ve found (in just one evening of gameplay though) that the sleep isn’t really a problem because taking damage cancels it.

Of course, I was mostly playing tanks or support, so I could either soak up the damage caused whilst sleeping or was just instagibbed in the same way that many characters can CC and instagib a support.

Hmm, might have to give this game another shot. D.Va is by far my favourite character but the last couple of weeks I have barely played because it seems she is rarely useful anymore so I always ended up playing as somebody I don’t enjoy as much.

Man, with Ana, you realize just how much people do this annoying nervous jiggling even while obviously not in range of enemies. And it’s suddenly irritating as hell trying to heal that damn Tracer who won’t stop squiggling around.

Yup. As I understand it, they didn’t want to actually nerf Mercy, but felt those simple Resurrection saves were too much of what made her good. Now she can’t do them as often, so probably needs to capitalize better rather than just suiciding.